What Happens When an Employee Is Terminated?

The answer to this question seems like a no-brainer: when an employee is terminated, they are quickly put through your offboarding process, which obviously includes removing access for terminated employees from all company systems. In an ideal world, this would happen 100% of the time at every company. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where only 29% of companies have a formal offboarding process that covers important steps like removing access and preventing former employees from unauthorized access. And that’s not to mention the facts like: 

• 86% of large enterprise organizations do not know or are grossly underestimating the magnitude of their privileged account security problem, while more than half of them share privileged passwords internally.
• Over 50% of US companies admitted that former employees could probably log into their systems after leaving the organization.

The lack of a formal offboarding process impacts more than your reputation though—without proper employee lifecycle management, your bottom line can also be significantly impacted. 

• A 2019 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that the average cost per employee for manual offboarding is approximately $15,000. 
• Almost half of all installed software and licensed SaaS applications went unused by employees, according to a new report from Nexthink. Translated to dollars, that puts the cost of unused software licenses at just over $44 million per month across more than 30 popular software tools. 

Luckily, there’s an easy answer to your offboarding woes: leveraging employee offboarding automation and unified access management tools like Lumos. Let’s learn more about what your offboarding process should look like, what to do after an employee is terminated at work, and how Lumos can help. 

What Should Happen When an Employee Is Terminated?

When you terminate an employee, your offboarding process should include: 

• HR and IT Oversight
  When an employee is terminated, HR should step in to prepare the necessary documents like the termination letter and final paycheck, conduct the termination meeting and exit interview, and notify relevant departments. They need to collaborate closely with IT to ensure access revocation is handled smoothly. IT’s role includes revoking the employee’s access to all company systems, retrieving and securing company-owned hardware like laptops and phones, and managing software licenses by reassigning or deactivating them. Your HR and IT teams are the most important part of a smooth and secure offboarding process.

• Automated Workflows
  Using automated tools saves you time and effort during the offboarding process—plus, leaning on technology to do boring repetitive tasks helps reduce the likelihood of human error (and your IT team will thank you!). Automation can help you with tasks like disabling accounts and revoking access, tracking offboarding tasks, sending reminders about those tasks to the correct person, backing up and transferring data, and more! Technology is a beautiful thing—you should use it!
  

• Documentation
  No one wants to run afoul of employee termination laws and thorough documentation is one of the best ways to avoid this fate. Make sure to build documentation into your offboarding processes—from jotting down the reasons for termination to writing down all the details about collecting the company laptops. You’ll need to check that every step follows employment laws and company policies. But, with proper documentation, you’ll have everything clearly laid out, making the entire process easier and more transparent.

What To Do After an Employee Is Terminated

After termination of employment, it’s important to take a few more steps: 

• Audit Your Process
  Regularly auditing the offboarding process helps you catch any issues and make sure everything runs smoothly. This includes security checks to confirm all access has been revoked and there are no leftover accounts or permissions hanging around. It also means reviewing and updating the process regularly to take in feedback and adapt to new regulations or company needs. Your auditing could even include things like creating or updating the “terminating an employee” script that your HR team uses during the initial meeting. Regular audits keep things running tight and secure, making sure you stay on top of compliance and protect your company's data​.

• Follow-Up
  After termination, following up with your former employee can go a long way towards creating an easy transition and keeping things positive. This could look like sending a follow-up email to cover any remaining steps, like delivering the final paycheck for the terminated employee or returning extra property. Or you could potentially offer support services, such as career counseling or job placement help, if available. This step helps tie up loose ends and supports your former employee in their next steps.

Lumos: Efficient Employee Lifecycle Management

With our unified access platform, you’ll have employee lifecycle management tools that let you:

• Streamline IT operations by automating the setup of user accounts and the provision of access to necessary software. 

• Manage identity access easily with the ability to track and manage the allocation of apps and licenses during employee transitions, as well as monitor usage to the entitlement and improve asset utilization strategically.

• Create HRIS-driven workflows and set triggers such as status changes, event data (start date or end dates), or an API call to grant or revoke access according to your controls.

• Enforce Joiner-Mover-Leaver policies and appropriately manage entitlements while delegating manual tasks to your admins. 

• Take control over internal changes with alerts, kicking off onboarding workflows based on changes in title, team, or department. 

• Monitor progress across the entire lifecycle before, during, and after they occur with a centralized view. You can easily loop in managers to gain context around their reports, boosting employee productivity.

But hold your horses, there’s more! We call ourselves a unified access platform, and we mean that. With Lumos you’ll also have the tools to help with: 

• Identity Governance
• Privileged Access Management
• User Access Reviews
• CIEM
• Spend Management
• SaaS Discovery
• Onboarding and Offboarding
• ITSM Automation

Excited for better offboarding, onboarding and everything in between? See Lumos in action today.